Things have changed. Today, there seems to be an unlimited supply of memoirs about how people beat the booze and conquer their addiction. A number of non-fiction writers are keen to understand how alcohol has shaped society with books about how booze “changed the world.” That's fair enough but books celebrating bars, beer, wine, and the hard stuff used to be commonplace but they now appear to belong to another generation.

Perhaps the greatest bookish irony of alcohol is that the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most collectible literary items of the 20th century - it's the tome that single-handedly created a genre and launched a hundred thousand self-help books.